What does the Lucknow episode tell us about ISIS influence in India?

In midst of the festival-like celebration that is the election period in the state of Uttar Pradesh, home to more than 200 million Indians, news of a terror cell of alleged ISIS apologists being busted in the capital Lucknow — leading to a shootout that killed one man named Saifulla — claimed the headlines.

As per reports, that have been erratic since this case took place — including the Uttar Pradesh police both accepting and later denying the involvement of the so-called Islamic State — the ‘cell’ traces its operations to a low intensity blast on a train in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, followed by the gun-fight in Lucknow that claimed the one life and led to several arrests. 

However, the larger question remains on what kind of effect ISIS can have in India, a country that has till now been largely unaffected by its sellable ideology which is backed by a very intensive online propaganda machine. There is no doubt that India has been on the map of ISIS ideologues, mostly led by educated Western jihadists who joined the so-called Islamic State’s caliphate in large numbers between the 2014-15 period. During this time, ISIS media propaganda online also released a host of material, which included a map of the extent to which it wanted to expand its caliphate by 2020. In 2014, pro-ISIS material, including videos advocating youth to join the terror group, appeared online in languages such as Hindi, Tamil and Urdu. Flyers and other written propaganda material was also released in Malayalam and Bengali at the same time. However, such targeted lingual material ceased to surface by late 2015, raising questions of whether a single individual in the organisation was behind it, and if it stopped due to the person’s killing or abandonment by the group. 

Only a handful of cases have appeared from India of people travelling to Iraq or Syria in hope of joining the Islamic State. However, data to study the effects and potential penetration of ISIS’ ideology in India and its people has a big grey area— the fact that more than 8 million Indians live in the larger Middle East region. Little is known of whether any citizens have been or are still fighting for ISIS from the diaspora already residing there. This is also difficult to detect as returning fighters in most countries have been successful in assimilating back into society.

Despite ISIS finding some takers in India, the effect of the group has been minimal as in most cases there have been ‘crude’ attempts to orchestrate attacks, with most instead looking to go to the caliphate itself. There has been, however, one oddity that defies global trend for ISIS sympathisers and the way both the organisation and its well-wishers orchestrate attacks on foreign lands. This is the debate of ‘lone wolf’ attacks, long thought to be the choice of ISIS to put its stamp of terror on cities in the West, specifically in the United States. However, India has seen quite the opposite as most people who have been arrested for pro-ISIS activities have instead worked in groups, barring a few exceptions such as Mehdi Biswas, a Bangalore-based engineer who was one of ISIS’s biggest online propagators on the social media site Twitter, tweeting under the @ShamiWitness banner. 

The relationship between an individual ISIS sympathiser and the propaganda said person comes in contact with presents a very interesting, yet fractured, case study to understand the lengths to which the terror group has been successful in this regard. While much has been written about the length to which ISIS online propaganda has found success, it still remains to be seen what direct impact such ‘handlers’ have had in actually radicalising people into attacking targets on the terror group’s behalf instead of pushing people already on the cusp of radicalised thinking. A recent study by the George Washington University has given such ISIS strategists the term ‘virtual entrepreneurs’, distancing from the term ‘handlers’. The reasoning given by authors Seamus Hughes and Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, based largely on examples of ISIS-inspired attacks orchestrated by a single individual, holds weight. They make a good case for not falling into the trap of giving ISIS too much credit for events that they may have either only had a minimal direct hand in promoting or taken responsibility for despite not having a hand in the play to begin with. 

“One of the benefits of such increased contact with radicalised Westerners is that it has given the Islamic State wider scope to claim ownership of attacks that it had little to do with in reality. This allows it to inflate its impact and reach, which is crucial to the group’s propaganda efforts,” Hughes and Meleagrou-Hitchens say. 

The above thought process is one that has been prevalent in scholarly circles despite ISIS’ propaganda machinery getting much space in mainstream Western media over its seeming effectiveness. To date, most cases of ISIS sympathisers in India have reportedly come from being influenced by online propaganda, largely via the social media site Facebook. This is, however, beyond the trend as ISIS prefers to use digital outlets, such as Telegram, SureSpot, Kik and so on, that offer it data protection with end-to-end encryption (and, more recently, WhatsApp, the largest messaging service used in India, after it switched to such data encryption). One such example traced its roots back to India after an ISIS operative named Abu Sa’ad al-Sudani, known for online propaganda, was linked to running an ‘ISIS cell’ in India using his oddly tranquil online name ‘HoneyNTea’. Here, al-Sudani, also known as Abu Isa al-Amriki, tried to help Indian national from Hyderabad, Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani, ‘reach IS’ via Greece and Turkey. Yazdani, as per reports, had encountered al-Sudani via Twitter by simply searching for the hashtags #ISIS and #Khalifa (caliphate). It was that easy. 

The trend of individuals looking to join ISIS, as of data available today, is still minimal. However, the debate over how and why their sympathies for the so-called Islamic State developed is the main research ground here, as any mass movement towards ISIS’ worldview within the Indian Muslim population would be contrarian from the historical perspectives of jihad in the sub-continent, which has almost exclusively been based around Kashmir and Pakistan. 

Kabir Taneja is an Associate Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.